[U-Boot-Users] Proposal for patch to configure networkparameters

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <1177306991.4872.25.camel at elrond.sweden.atmel.com> you wrote:
>
> Since U-Boot does have a enviroment area. the natural place
> to put compile time initialization is in the environment area
> and compile the environment as a separate entity which is linked
> to the environment. You can define a sector in the <board>.lds.
> It will not handle "reset to factory defaults" though.
> 
> Then you can have compile time initialization AND 
> if you so choose, you could during production decide
> to first program u-boot into the flash, and then afterwards
> modify the environment.
> On a dataflash that is easy, since the minimium erase block is 1056
> bytes and you have several blocks in the environment area.

It's good that we have an agreement here. This is exactly what I
proposed to you a couple of times before.

> Doing it this way, still require you to *create* the environment data
> Until there is a configuration method which allows your
> grandmother to get networking running my proposed patch is still useful.

I cannot follow this conclusion, though.

> My goal is to make it easier for the user, and I hopefully 
> will at a later stage will have a small application which
> will generate a board specific script which can be installed
> on the production PC and run once per board.
> 
> Currently the ethernet address is already set by u-boot.
> It is set to 00:00:00:00:00:00, making it impossible 
> to communicate over ethernet.

This is making it difficult to the user. I guess  each  board  has  a
real  MAC  address,  so  why  don't  you use this one? [Also, IMO not
setting the MAC address at all is still better than setting it  to  a
non-working value.]

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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